At this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day, the central message was “Don’t
Stand By!” the British Conservatives having invested huge sums in the event
and also in drawing up Holocaust Commissions to help us never to forget.

Admirable and noble intentions, indeed. Nevertheless, when one considers
that, in 2009, the same British Conservatives – intent on moving away from
Merkel and Sarkozy – set up shop with a rag-bag of ultra-nationalists from
Latvia, the
National Alliance which, each and every year since 1998, has supported
glorification of the Latvian legionnaires who joined the brutal 15th and 19th
divisions of the SS, then one can only question how serious the British
Conservatives really are regarding Holocaust education, especially if they show
such duplicitous standards.

According to David
Lidington, the current Europe minister, such “complex matters” are best
dealt with by historians, at the same time as failing to condemn Baltic state
policies and practices that promote glorification of Nazism.

Since 2014, the Latvian parliament has made it illegal for any minister
to attend the march, Minister
Einars Cilinskis from the National Alliance was sacked for doing so in 2014
but it has come to light that in 2015, despite the ban, justice
minister Dzintars Rasnačš from the same party attended the march. He was
not sacked.

Fast forward to this year’s SS commemorative march and though the number
of participants may have dropped by a couple of hundred, around 1,000 still
attended, mainly young and misinformed…passionate in their deluded belief that their
fathers and grandfathers were freedom fighters against the Soviets rather than
collaborators with arguably the most genocidal regime the world has ever known.

No
ministers attended but, as in previous years, quietly
slipped away from the foreign press to the Lestene
cemetery where SS soldiers are buried. However, Kaspars Gerhards,
of the National Alliance and Minister for Environmental Protection and Regional
Development of the Republic of Latvia, did arrange for his parliamentary
secretary, Jānis
Eglīts, to attend the march and accompany the notorious right-wing Estonian
politician Jaak Madison there.

Madison is the
man who in 2015 defended, on his old blog spot, the economic aspects of the
Nazi regime. At the Monument of Freedom Madison was promptly challenged by Kremlin
stooge and British
journalist Graham Philips who quite rightly asked him, if he was not
ashamed to be attending a fascist march.

Madison responded with childish insults, feeling strong in the company
of numbers whilst Philips was swiftly whisked away by armed police and dumped
into a van to the amusement of the crowd.

Justice Minister Rasnačš did not attend the march, as he had illegally
done in 2015 – clearly he is above the law – but not so long ago his
parliamentary secretary, Jānis
Iesalnieks is known to have stated on Twitter that Norwegian mass killer Anders
Breivik is a good boy, to which Breivik responded by stating that the
National Alliance and Mr. Iesalnieks are in his imaginary
nazi network!

Alarmingly, The National Alliance, whose parliamentary secretaries
clearly have their uses, has been in the ruling coalition with the Greens since February.

If all this was not enough, only a few days before the march, Kārlis
Seržants, a
high-ranking Greens politician who sits on the Latvian Parliament’s
national security committee outrageously stated, that “clever
Jews” were compromising state security while Cornelia Kerth, chair of
one of Germany’s most important anti-fascist organisations, the Association of
Persons Persecuted by the Nazis/Federation of Antifascists (VVN-BdA), entered
Hamburg airport to board her flight with Air Baltic to Riga only to be informed
by the airport authorities that she could not board the plane as she was on a
“black list of the Latvian immigration authorities’.

Five
other VVN-BdA members, Thomas Willms, Markus Tervooren, Günther Hoppe,
Lothar Eberhard and Werner Müller, who took a Ryanair flight from Berlin,
thought they were lucky to be allowed into Riga, only to be immediately
arrested at Riga airport.

They were informed that they fell under
§61 of Latvian immigration law, the persona non grata rule, which
can be applied when a “foreigner causes a threat to national security or public
order and safety.” And this in the Schengen zone!

The five
detained protesters were given a choice of deportation or two-days
incarceration and chose the latter. In response, the
VVN released, the day before the march, a statement accusing the
Latvian authorities of “repression” against Latvian protesters.

“For years, the march by Waffen-SS
admirers has enjoyed the protection of the Latvian government. The few anti-fascists
protesting…will be handled by politicians and the media as enemies of the
state”, it said.

Dr
Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre agreed and branded the arrests
of the anti-fascists as “absurd” and “highly objectionable.”

‘‘Anyone,” Zuroff said, “who fought for the victory of the Third Reich
shouldn’t be a hero.” The Latvian patriotic account often omits that about
70,000 Jews were exterminated in Latvia, largely with local collaboration,
while the Nazis were hailed as liberators.

“The Latvian Legion did not directly participate in Holocaust crimes but
it did fight for the Germans and many of its members had previously taken part
in the mass murder of Jews as part of the Latvian security police and the Arajs
Kommando, a police unit connected to the German SD.

The organisers of the Riga march continue to present the members of the
Legion as freedom fighters who paved the way for Latvian independence but
nothing could be further from the truth.

The Nazis had absolutely no intention of granting independence to any of
the Baltic countries and it is only because Nazi Germany lost the Second World
War that Latvia could regain its independence after the fall of the USSR.
People who fought for the victory of Third Reich should not be glorified as
heroes – such a victory would have meant the end of Western civilisation.”

Zuroff further told the press that Russia, under Vladimir Putin, uses
the Baltic nations’ ultra-nationalist marches in propaganda to falsely depict
the populations of those countries as fascist.

“They are not,” he declared, “but they are also derelict in confronting
the canard that fighting alongside Nazis was patriotic, and that Soviet
domination was in any way comparable to the Holocaust.”

Nor do they help themselves by ignoring the voices of their own
citizens, many of who are ethnic Russians and totally opposed to such
manifestations of Nazi glorification.

Having myself become aware of this disgusting spectacle since 2011 and
actively protested against it since
2012, I have to ask today where will this situation lead as tensions
between the Baltic states and Russia escalate and when, suddenly, the murder of
thousands of innocent Jews by men who later joined the Latvian SS – and the
deaths of 1,500,000 innocent men, women and children, just outside Leningrad,
caused by starvation, as a consequence of the Nazi blockade that the Latvian 15th
and 19th SS divisions helped forge as they fought against the Red
Army – are not murders to be remembered and condemned but rather ignored or
just seen as another statistic, another sad casualty of war.

Cornelia Kerth, chair of the VVN-BdA protesting outside the Latvian embassy in Berlin on 15 March 2016 after having been prevented from boarding a flight to Riga from Berlin with Baltic Air earlier that same day. The VVN-BdA demanded that her five fellow protesters, who had been allowed to leave the country, only to be arrested on arrival at Riga airport and placed into a Latvian jail, be immediately released.

'Sad day. In Riga where several hundred people turned out to honor the soldiers of the two Latvian SS divisions, who fought for a victory of Nazi Germany in WW I...I. Portrayed as freedom fighters who paved the way for Latvian independence (which the Nazis had no intention of giving them), they included participants in the mass murder of Latvian Jewry and many thousands of Jews deported to Latvia to be murdered'

Dr Efraim Zuroff, Simon Wiesenthal Centre

Listen to Dr Efraim Zuroff speaking on Monday 21 March on Salford City Radio 94.4FM

Interior Minister Rihards Kozlovskis on March 16 stating that only one person was arrested when in fact five law abiding German citizens were arrested at Riga airport for simply wishing to peacefully protest at the march. Note that the minister did not mention that Azov Neo Nazis attended the march or Holocaust revisionists such as Estonian politician Jaak Madison.

A variety of voices with:
Liana Langa on setting the record straight
Juris Ulmanis on the Legion and the National Guard
Boriss Cilevics on politics and March 16
Mr and Mrs Harries
Efraim Zuroff on anti-Semitism

Security Police head Normunds Mezvietis Forgot to Mention that Innocent Protesters Would Be Arrested at Riga Airport whilst Azov Neo Nazis would be accompanied by politicians

"One of the purposes of the anti-fascists is to provoke the event participants," he said."By separating the different groups the risk of physical violence has been minimised," he added.He also said that EU citizens were harder to prevent from entering the country, but that they could still be prevented."Increased border controls are a traditional measure taken, and one that we will be using this year as well," Mezviets said.